


Pater meus

by unofficialsherlockian



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, causes and consequences, discussions around it, no graphic discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 03:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11119062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unofficialsherlockian/pseuds/unofficialsherlockian
Summary: "Of course there must have been something like this," she thinks, but feels guilty for thinking it.And yet, something nagged her that she was missing the bigger picture, still.





	Pater meus

She stares at Sherlock Holmes through the one way glass, thinking maybe he is bearing his heart to the boy. 

It's out of character for him to do so as he knows he is fully visible, being watched just a paces away. And yet, she's noticed a certain feeling she gets when he tells the truth. Later on, she'll grow to trust and love it.

Joan watched Sherlock question the boy, revealing a history of violence, bullying (abuse) at the hands of his peers at boarding school. "Of course there must have been something like this," she thinks, but feels guilty for thinking it. Just because someone was different does not mean their past was violent. And yet she'd known far too many addicts to say that most of them grew up with stable lives. Sherlock, an exception in so many ways, did not seem to be an exception in this case.

And yet, something nagged her that she was missing the bigger picture, still.

\----  
He looks at Sherlock, feeling forgiving and honest. He's too good of a man, too good of a cop, he's often told. This job is full of monsters, and he doesn't want to become a monster to combat that.

He would be a fool to not have known about the drug addiction. Tommy would have been a bigger fool to have turned away Sherlock Holmes because of it.

Drug abuse still seems an incredibly stupid thing for one so smart to have dabbled in. But Tommy has known Sherlock for a little while, long enough to see the man vibrate with energy, pace holes in the floor with nervous ticks as he explained things. Fragile is not the word he would call Sherlock, but unstable came to mind. Some kind of anxiety was hard-wired into the man, and it worried Tommy some days. 

They weren't friends but if he could make a habit of helping where others might be prone to hurting, Tommy hoped that his working relationship with Sherlock would work out.

\----  
He'd essentially offered to be a ear to Graham, without giving away too much personal detail. Sherlock struck the bag furiously, boxing an outlet where other things could not be, not anymore. He always had nervous energy with emotions, and tonight he felt alight with so much he'd kept pent up.

Maybe it was New York, maybe it was the people he now knew, but he felt he was becoming different.

\----  
He tells Kitty.

Not right away, because he knows she doesn't trust him, and he isn't sure he can do attachment anymore, not after leaving New York. But Kitty has been hurt in a way he hasn't been, and yet she's stronger than he ever could be. She won't look him in the eyes, but she's learning from him, learning quickly, and she's good.

And she has a habit of seeing things about him that other's often didn't.

It's a couple weeks before they are due in New York, and she asks.

And he answers. They share a moment of silence, equal respect. He wonders if he's capable of this same mutual understanding with everyone. 

It's probably that understanding that makes Sherlock's voice tremble as Watson confronts him about his over-protectiveness of Kitty, why his chest feels tight when he voices out loud, she "thought of doing herself harm." He loves Kitty, and this truth is wrenched out from him with the truth of how close they'd gotten that he knew of that fact. Watson looks like she understands but he isn't sure if she knows as clearly as he does.

\----  
Sherlock takes the kit and huddles under the bridge, barely giving a thought to what he's doing until after he's done it.  
He then, on the roof of the brownstone, has time to wallow, to reflect, to hate himself a little bit. To take a few days to be upset.

He'd nearly beaten the man to death, and that almost scares him more than the relapse. Somewhere in that tunnel, he lost himself, and he's not sure if that descent began earlier that day, at his first strike, or when the needle pierced his skin. He'd felt himself changing of late, and hoped he was becoming better. But now Sherlock isn't sure he knows himself so well.

What is odd is that Joan doesn't ask him to talk, stands by his side, often silently, but talking and offering things like tea with what would have been infuriating normalcy, if it weren't for the fact that something in her voice speaks of more worry and kindness than he's heard from her before. When she announces his father is coming, he isn't really surprised. Dad never shows, so even if he came to New York, it would probably be a show of power. 

But he can barely stop himself from twitching at the announcement anyways.

\----  
The three of them stand in the brownstone, face to face to face at last. Joan watches Sherlock grow nervous, standing tall and also shrinking. 

There's a moment, and Morland Holmes raises a hand, perhaps to rub the back of his head, or paw his face in frustration, but whatever the cause, it doesn't matter to Joan, because Sherlock flinched. Flinched as if he didn't even know what he was doing.

"I'm sorry Mr. Holmes," Joan says, cutting off whatever the fool was about to say, "but you need to leave."

She'd told him before that she wouldn't let him hurt Sherlock. She'd missed a lot.

Joan walks back into the room after shutting Morland out to see Sherlock still rooted to the same spot, face unreadable. She wasn't sure what to do, because although they handle emotional and hard subjects, there was never a guide she could follow for doing so. Sherlock had a hair-trigger for so many things...a weight settled in Joan's chest as she realized that she found another reason why.

She settles for putting her arms around him in a gentle hug, her face at his shoulder. "I'm sorry, I should have know," she whispers. "I didn't know." She tries not to ask "why didn't you tell me?" because she can hazard a guess to a number of answers, and all of them won't change anything. She didn't know.

"I should have told you," Sherlock mutters, and his voice sounds unstable in a way that tells her she should keep up the hug. He's boneless in her arms.

"No," she says. 

Sherlock swallows heavily. "You would think by now I'd... have some control over myself." He shakes his head. "Bloody basket case. He wouldn't have," his voice catches.

"Even if he wouldn't have hurt you then, he did before," Joan says firmly, and keeps holding his shoulders as she pulls away to look at him firmly. "I'm sorry, Sherlock..." she says softly.

He looks at her, eyes piercing. "This isn't your fault." Joan shakes her head.

"I kept pushing you to try to reconnect. Had I known this or even ... guessed it..." but as she stands there, she thinks over the years of moments where she'd thought she'd had him figured out, always feeling like she was missing something; a line she could have drawn between pieces of evidence had never connected fully before today.

"It's not something I discuss readily," Sherlock says stiffly, finally removing herself from her grip. "It's something very few people know... I'm not sure how I feel about you knowing," he says in a small voice.

She nods at that, finally something familiar in their friendship. "You know I'm here if you want to talk about it." He nods.

\----  
He doesn't need to look Joan fully in the eye to recognize that she sees the same in the boy, Brian, as he does. Drug use, and clearly uncomfortable around his father. Who had brought the boy here with him, god knows why. But thank god he did or Sherlock and Joan wouldn't have seen what they do now.

Joan extends comfort, taking the boy away to their kitchen for tea, probably one of those conversations that make you look into her eyes and tell her something of the truth, and the offer of an ear to listen, if the boy needed. If he refused, Sherlock had faith in her pickpocketing skills that she would slip him her card anyways. Sherlock made a mental note to do the same.

But not before he was able to look the father in the eye, telling him what he already knew--the boy's injury had not been the boy's fault, the root cause of the boys addiction probably also came from the man who stood before you.

"First, I'm gonna punch you." And he does, in the face, just short of his full-strength boxer's punch, perfected from many hours with the bag in the gym, picturing other's faces, quite clearly. In some ways, this was cleansing.

Later, Brian looks from Sherlock's hand to his father's face. Joan does the same, coldly offering the man a tissue. Sherlock slips his card into the boy's pocket.

"I'm glad we both noticed the same thing," Joan said later, sitting next to Sherlock on the couch, passing him a mug of tea. He sips it, glad for the warmth.

"I half-expected your disapproval with my method, in this case."

Joan snorts. "If you hand't I might have." He smiles faintly.

The evening sunlight washes over them and he feels much better.

A few days later, Brian shoots him a text, asking Sherlock to thank Joan for him. Sherlock replies, thinking of a way to put what he wants to say in a way that Joan wouldn't. "Talking might help," he texts back. "I know another young man; you're free to meet up with us sometimes."

Near the end of the week, he's sitting in a park with Graham and Brian, the three of them pretending to be distracted by a phone, or picking at the grass. Sherlock watches the both of them, nervous ticks and all, and hopes this is good.

\----  
"WERE YOU UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE DEALING WITH A NICE MAN?" he roars, and Joan doesn't flinch, looks him in the eye, and speaks reasonably. He's furious, and he knows it, and scared, in a way. He can feel many words, dangerous, on the tip of his tongue.

"One of us had to find out what he was up to," Joan says.

"And your rational for acting behind. my. back?" he asks. 

"Because maybe your judgement when it comes to your father isn't the best," she says.

That sets him off, because he'd doubted himself, his experiences, for years, and he wasn't about to have that from Joan as well, Joan who'd said she would've known.

"I've got several scars to prove that my judgement of my father is perfectly reasonable," he says in a low voice. Joan's face steels.

"Sherlock," she says, and he turns away, heart pounding. Enough he's had enough. "I mean your judgement of how to act, when your father comes into play." He closes his eyes, hands trembling slightly. He doesn't like being this angry. He worries he's more his father's son than he realizes. "Sherlock, look at me."

He does, finally, and she's looking at him like he matters. And that's really all he's ever needed from her. 

"I'm sorry," he says, "for doubting you."

\----  
"You know this is the first time you've ever mentioned your father? Even in passing?"

"My dad brokers in global misery usually doesn't come up." He tries to keep the edge out of his voice, but his throat feels tight.

"You okay?" Gregson asks. Sherlock pauses, looking at him.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"You just told me you suspect your own father of murder," Gregson says. There's none of the gentleness in his voice as there is when he questions victims, but a different kind of gentle, the kind Watson often gives him.

"I think you're imagining a different sort of father-son relationship," Sherlock says, holding the eye contact. "Or a father-son relationship at all. But thank you."

Gregson keeps his gaze. Sherlock feels there's something else on the man's mind. But neither of them say anymore.

\----  
"Biology dictates reality," he tells Joan. Nature versus nurture, he'd always been more of a "nature" person. "I am the son of Morland Holmes."

\----  
"I wanted to check in one more time." Gregson looks at Sherlock, noting all the anxiety in the man's body. Absolutely nothing about this made him feel right. Sherlock's responses seem too passive. "Before I pay him a visit," he says, and notes the second's worth of confusion, anxiety, and disbelief cross Sherlock's face before his expression settles on passive again.

"Would you like me to go with you?"

Gregson feels the last thing he wants is to put Sherlock near his father anymore. "No, just me," he says through his teeth. Disbelief again, on Sherlock's face. "I wanna see him for myself." He swallows as Sherlock looks away. "He hurt you, didn't he?" it comes out before he can stop himself, but he's been here before, with kids and teens, victims or otherwise, he's seen it all before. And goddamn if he won't make sure that Sherlock's okay before he visits the man's father.

Emotion flutters through Sherlock's face and he gets ahold of himself quickly, but Gregson knows then he's hit the nail on the head. Something in his chest tightens.

"Why would you say that?" the false passiveness isn't annoying him anymore, it's breaking his heart. 

"Because I'm not stupid," Gregson looks Sherlock in the eye as Sherlock swallows heavily, looking angry. "And I'm not gonna see you any differently for it. Remember when we talked about your addiction problem?"

Sherlock nods tightly, and Gregson sees him tightening and opening his fists, trying to quell some nervousness. 

"You are who you are because of you, not because of him," Gregson says, "I'm not gonna take this information any differently than anything else I've learned about you."

Sherlock bows his head. "I don't tell people about this, Gregson." His voice sounds slightly rough.

"Yeah," Gregson says. He puts an arm around Sherlock's shoulders and feels him tremble with anxiety and emotion. He feels his own throat grow thick. "Giving me more reason to go see him now. How badly would he take it if I hit him in the face?"

Sherlock lets out a harsh laugh. "He's put men in the ground for less." His tone is bitter and Gregson swallows. "Him being a suspect is enough reason for you to see him, no need to drag my problems into the equation. Doesn't matter." He sniffs, running his sleeve across his eyes, and looks up.

"Matters to me," Gregson says.

\----  
Gregson looks Morland Holmes in the eye and manages not to punch him. But he swears to himself that if anything more were to happen to Sherlock because of this man, he would do anything he could to hurt him.

\----  
Joan looks back, briefly, to see Sherlock close his eyes and take a steadying breath. They could find Morland Holmes dead in this building, and he is trying to ready himself for that, without her or anyone else noticing. She turns away, wondering how he would feel if it was Morland dead.  
She knows she wouldn't feel sad about it.

\----  
"I'm glad he won't be visiting us again in the foreseeable future," he offers and she looks over to him and nods.

\----  
"Signs," he says. "There almost always are when it comes to victims of abuse." He saves his voice from changing too drastically on the last word. Call something what it is, don't flinch away from your own experiences, things he's had to realize over the years. "I'm sorry," he says. 

He and Marcus are both speaking in almost harsh, guarded tones. He's not sure even now if he's doing the right thing.

\----  
"I know that... it can have a profound effect on one's sense of who they are." He's felt himself stuttering over a lack of personal pronouns, awkward sentencing, something even Bell might notice. "Ah... It did on me," he says softly, and steals glances at Bell as the man's body goes stiff in surprise.

"Sorry?" Bell asks, questioning like he didn't hear. Sherlock nods once, avoiding looking at Bell directly. Bell frowns. "Signs I don't notice, apparently," he sighs.

"Not even Joan did," he admits. "I don't think even I would be able to tell as often as I do without the experience." 

Bell shifts, meets him in the eyes. "Affects your sense of who you are," Bell says, echoing him. Sherlock nods.

"Even with that, you are an extraordinary man, and that is very precious in this world, in our work."

Bell lets out a breath, smiling slightly.

Sherlock closes his eyes, glad for even that small smile.

"You didn't let it affect who you became either," Bell says. Sherlock stills. Then he looks up to Bell. "They did all they did but in the end..." Bell shrugs slightly. "Screw 'em, right?"

Sherlock lets out a breath of a laugh. "Screw them." He looks at Bell. "Have you ever eaten ants?"

\----

"Because of who I've come to know," he'd said before as his reasoning for thriving.

Choice and influence might dictate more than biology ever could.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly thought given the parallels drawn between Sherlock and several characters that this might have come up during season 4. (It didn't) It's still kicked around as an idea ever since, so here are some instances where it might've come up.
> 
> All comments and kudos are appreciated. Thanks for reading. :)


End file.
